Ttystikk's vertical goodness

Hey dude, checked out their website. Love the 2ton w/matching handler; very sweet. perfect for running 2 bloomrooms on a flip schedule.

Was wondering about your integrated controller. I assume co2 gets top priority. The temps high/low set points you use to run your chiller right? Does it not have a huey OR dehuey set point high/low as well? I run a dedicated temp controller for fans/cooling and rh controller for humidifying. Currently, have no choice. Lung room rh is down at 10%. Soon i can change the rh controller to dehuey if/when spring starts. Sometimes i don't hit my temp set point (high) and my humidity is at 80%. Conventional wisdom be damned, plants love it. Gonna have to buy a dehuey within a month though.

killemsoftly said:

Hey dude, checked out their website. Love the 2ton w/matching handler; very sweet. perfect for running 2 bloomrooms on a flip schedule.

Was wondering about your integrated controller. I assume co2 gets top priority. The temps high/low set points you use to run your chiller right? Does it not have a huey OR dehuey set point high/low as well? I run a dedicated temp controller for fans/cooling and rh controller for humidifying. Currently, have no choice. Lung room rh is down at 10%. Soon i can change the rh controller to dehuey if/when spring starts. Sometimes i don't hit my temp set point (high) and my humidity is at 80%. Conventional wisdom be damned, plants love it. Gonna have to buy a dehuey within a month though.

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I like running with my RH up in the mid 70s, myself, same reason; damning convention, lol

Yes, the controller can be set for adding or reducing RH, and right now, it's tied to an exhaust fan; when RH climbs too high, the extractor fan kicks on.

Tuesday's meeting with the people at Hydro Innovations told me that 8" Iceboxes are woefully inadequate in terms of surface area. They showed me a dual air handler approach that allows for separate control for dehuey and cooling.

I'm in lust with their Banks 5 Ton unit, with the hot water circuit option. If I get that bitch, my furnace is OUTTA THERE! My hot water heater will be for backup, if I bother at all. And my home will be the beneficiary of hot and cold running water for domestic use AND HVACR.

Such a unit would provide the incentive to build out the hot water circuits here, and when that's done I will look into the purchase of a few thousand watts worth of FUEL CELL ELECTRICAL POWER COGENERATION. Electricity for less than the power company can provide, and FREE HEAT cogenerated as part of the process is yours as part of the deal- and the savings. Once the cost of heat is factored in, fuel cells can pay for themselves in just a few years in colder markets.

Tonight I'm attending the local city power utility's public meeting for discussion of future opportunities and challenges. I intend to hold their feet to the fire to accept power from consumers and pay at a rate that provides real incentive for people to do it, instead of merely paying lip service until they get their next coal fired soot belcher online.

Watch this space!

Outta sight Ty, Fuckin' Fantastic!

I love it. I'm very interested in what you're up to next vis a vis chillin, tech upgrades, etc. Awesome amigo! You go bro, sell those bastards back some real GREEN power baby!

When you've gone through the process you need to implement I'd love to get some links off you so's i can read up on the fuel cells. I've done a fair amount of reading and research on chillers, handlers, mini-splits, etc but have never done any reading on fuel cells. In the past they had a rep for being unstable, wether that is deserved or not idk?

i recently had an epiphany that will simplify my grow. There's a strain that was developed in Quebec. It thrives in lower light conditions and is very mold resistant. I can source it at hempdepot.ca This strain will do the wall of dank shuffle perfectly. if a tree grows out 4' from the wall and the bulb ends up 12-18'' away in a straight line to the bulb then the distance 2.5' to the left or right of the bulb will be: D^2=x^2+y^2; =1.5''^2'+2.5''^2=2.25+6.25; D^2=8.5~3' In other words the plant is 1.5' away from the bulb as it faces it and only 3' at it's left and right. It makes my life so much simpler to just let the plant grow as a tree and do it's thing iff I have a strain that can cope with lower light levels and still produce.

I hear ya about rh. Plants love high rh, way beyond what the dogmatist would have you believe. these guys quote growing orthodoxy like it's a religion. At week5/6 of bloom it may, however, be time to start dropping rh, especially at lights out eh? I was just curious in my last post as to why you weren't running dedicated dehuey and saving the c02. I think you were doing what i would have done and waited to upgrade the 'handler' side of things so that you could have tighter control. What's the point of buying an intermediate device like a basement home dehuey if one should upgrade a handler. I betcha once ya upgrade you will have such tight control you will be as happy as a man who finds out his geothermal guy upgraded him to 480v 3phase. Well, maybe not that happy but close.


Congrats again dude. Sky's the limit

Did you realize these guys actually have NUCLEAR POWER as an energy production option for 'mid term consideration', meaning 20-50 years from now- and fuel cells simply weren't on the chart at all?

I heard exactly no one miss their chance to tell the power company to take nuclear power off the table as an option, full stop. That's nice and all, but to make sure they don't start scheming about doing it anyway, ("No emissions! Better nuclear power options are coming out all the time! Every technology has problems..." ) I want to be there ready to rock and roll with a viable, practical, cost effective and fuel flexible solution that makes nuclear impossibly expensive, and therefore unattractive.

I went several steps further and not only fleshed out the fuel cell option, but made a point of placing that fuel cell in the customer's own home, so they can take advantage of the benefits of cogeneration right where they live. I then challenged them to advocate for the right of consumers to actually contribute whatever excess electricity they've generated back to the grid at a reasonable market price.

Currently, their wholesale cost of power is about 70% of retail price on average. Peak load power generation is many times more expensive than that. They generate electricity at about 35% efficiency, and since these are plants at remote sites, the heat is simply dumped. The only reason that's affordable is because the price of coal has been locked in by long term contracts- and those are set to rise drastically in the next few years, as these contracts come up for renewal and begin to reflect current market realities.

One of the most exciting technologies coming online from the power company's perspective is a 'combined cycle' natural gas fired power plant, where the heat from the glorified jet turbine engine spinning the generator is also captured and utilized to generate additional power, bringing total efficiency up to the 60% neighborhood. Since the cost of natural gas is roughly ten times that of coal, this doesn't exactly reduce the price of generated power overall, even if it does look REALLY good as a low producer of CO² per megawatt.

Fuel cells already generate electricity at 40-65% efficiency, handily beating the power company at its own game- even before the benefits of cogenerated heat are factored in. That pushes total efficiency towards 90%, territory nothing in the power company's inventory can touch. The best part is that fuel cells actually work best and longest when they're run flat out, 100% constantly, like the little base load power generators they are. When the homeowner doesn't use all the power, s/he should be able to sell the excess back to the grid for someone else to use. This creates huge incentives for the kind of distributed power network we've been hearing about for years- but never seem to see progress in actually getting built.

I told y'all at the very beginning of this thread that it was going to be heavy on geek and light on glamour shots. The simple fact of the matter is that cannabis has become a looking glass, through which we can see the future of everything we do as a species. Few fields of human endeavor are immune from the influence of this industry, or its needs.

But what about solar? Solar power has a problem; nighttime. Seriously, if your solar panel is rated at 100 watts of peak power, after all is said and done, they produce only 16%, or an average of just 16 watts over time. No wonder they take 30 years to pay for! Wind is better; they get up to 30% of maximum rated power over time- but it's not predictable, and it's far more variable than solar.

Batteries suck; power, that is! Betcha didn't know that you only get 60-75% of your juice back out of a full charge? Transmission lines suck too; on average, HALF of all power generated is lost just sending it to the customer! That's compounding all the inefficiencies of producing it remotely even more...

Fuel cells are the future. There simply is no other alternative that's anywhere near as efficient, or as ready for prime time. But you don't want to shackle yourself to fracking for life, you say? No problem, I say! Your future fuel cell will be happy to nosh on biogas, munch methane- and its favorite fuel of all is clean hydrogen, produced any way you want.

Now, all we have to do is drag the establishment into this bright new future, kicking and screaming if necessary! It's up to YOU.

...and here's the one single biggest thing YOU can do to secure our energy future from the monopolists; write any and all of your elected representatives and tell them you want to be able to sell your excess home generated power back to the power company- and that you should be paid fairly for that power, so that if you're providing it at the time of highest demand, you should be paid a lot more for it than if you're producing it when demand is low. After all, the power company does- the more we save them when it counts, the more it's worth, right? This is one of those ideas that really can change the world for the better, and how can YOUR senator, congressman, city council member, publicly elected energy policy committee member or chair, assemblyman, city manager...

Hey ty,

You know we are in kind of a tough spot here in N. America. Economy is 'booming' with 3%GDP growth and our recesssions are getting nastier and nastier. We've got all this aging infrastructure we built up from the post war era boom:water, elec, pipelines. You name it. Man, it is going to be a mess. The smart guy/gal is definitely going to want to look to be independent as much as possible. I have to go back through my high school sciences, thank f$ck i went through high school and some university level maths a few years ago or i"d be lost. I'm gonna have to get a handle on fuel cells, geo-thermal, nat-gas wells, etc and see what my options are for down the road. I can see a future in 10 years where rising energy/food costs have a drastic effect on living standards.

Any and all links you have to any of this stuff would be much appreciated.

Wanna hear a good one: have had high rh for a week or so. Had to use a really sticky basement primer to get rid of some pink algae and a touch of black mold in a corner. Also, becasue i found tape to be ineffective I used popsicle sticks to label 2 new strains i'm trying out. The popsicle sticks got moldy. Guess what has never show one sign of mold or pm? You guessed it: the plants! I wonder where this paranoia around rh came from. I remember a guy telling me that where he lived a lot of guys took their fresh air intake from a roof vent. In that area there was a tendency for a certain type of mold spore to get into their grows during the fall or spring. Probably from rotting leaves at ground level. I'm pretty much convinced that their are so many species/varietals of pm, gray mold, mites, thrips, etc. that it is pretty tough to come up with a hard and fast rule. I prefer to observe, learn, inprovise, adapt,etc. I'm pretty happy with how much i've learned/am learning and keep plugging away.

I tell you, i am super excited to see if i can get this low-light adapted strain to be a tree and produce well in a wall of dank. It's supposedly a really intense smoke too. I guess what i like about verting is that the obsession with even canopy isn't a limiter. I've done some drawings. My space has a corner where heating pipes are boxed in. i lose 9''x 22'' there. Also, the door opens in and has a 30'' radius. I figure that i can do trees and some sog as a work around of the room not being a perfect rectangle. i can't wait to see how all this plays out over the next few months.

I'll be interested to see what options you go with on the chiller system. Man, if i were you i would be so stoked.

Killenemsoftly, you must really like goading me up onto my soapbox, LOL

The 'recession' we're currently suffering through is the result of a systemic shift of income to be more and more unequal, to the point of unsustainable- nevermind unjustifiable- extremes.

I just googled 'fuel cells for sale', last I checked, I could get 1kWh of fuel cell powered electrical generation for $5000, plus installation. Search around and see what you find, and share with me?

High RH is fine until late peak bloom, when it's time to start dialing it down. By the last week it should be below 60%.

I'm excited to see what you come up with for your space!

Bubba Nub said:

How's that fan workin out for ya?

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Update; fan blowing straight up the silo works great.

A few recent shots. Things are coming along.

New site looks good!

The silo is cruising along, stacking on growth every day. I'm just checking pH and EC and watching...

Did a nutrient changeout last night, girls look like they're enjoying their home.

Recent crop pix;

Okay, so using this website from a smartphone is officially a pain in the ass.

This is a regular four foot tall by four foot diameter silo, and the plant did not fill it in. This is one problem the Super Silo solves, the other being uneven light distribution, without resorting to crazy ideas like mountain bikes hanging from the ceiling, lol

These units are coming into their own, I think.

That is adoreable........and answers all questions which is prolly why you avoid pics so much.
Must be really bad if that was the best you could cherry pick a pic truely is worth all of your delusion filled babblings.
One hint...........lowering the rh will tighten them fluffs up quite a bit.

Good to see you around Ttystikk and glad I found this thread. I will be busting out my reading glasses...

slumdog80 said:

Good to see you around Ttystikk and glad I found this thread. I will be busting out my reading glasses...

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Good to see you, thanks for the kind words! It's still early on figuring out what works. I'm optimistic, none of the issues I've run across are insurmountable.

taint said:

That is adoreable........and answers all questions which is prolly why you avoid pics so much.
Must be really bad if that was the best you could cherry pick a pic truely is worth all of your delusion filled babblings.
One hint...........lowering the rh will tighten them fluffs up quite a bit.

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Hey, thanks for the encouraging words. Next time you try something different I hope you receive the same.

I rebuilt the room for two Super Silos- which crams it full, indeed. All components are modular, so everything was reused, nothing wasted. The odd leftover bits of 1" hose and various fittings will come in handy soon as they fit every system I have, both for tubs and waterfall manifolds.

I'm going to place Mylar on the ceiling and across the bottom of each Super Silo, to see if it helps.

One Super Silo will get both of my digital ballasts and the other one will get magnetic. I can't think of a better side by side comparison setup, since both silos are the same side and shape, running the same nutrients in the same room.